


Classic Hollywood Bullshit

by LokiOfSassgaard



Category: Marvel, Punisher Max
Genre: Gen, Guns, Swearing, non-sexual masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:32:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1332010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a shit job, but that doesn't mean he's bitter about it.  Someone's got to do it, and just because it has to be him doesn't mean he hates it.  Hate and bitterness are both far too emotional.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Classic Hollywood Bullshit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beedekka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beedekka/gifts).



Fucking rain. He hated the rain. It wasn’t the damp in the air, or the ceaseless leak in the roof that he hated. Those could be ignored. It was all the damn noise. Noise that masked other noises — covered the sounds of footsteps or idling cars. Was that clatter outside someone trying to get in, or just a tabbycat trying to escape the torrential downpour? Was that the sound of someone walking outside, or just rain leaking off the eaves?

That was always the problem with bolt holes. Especially bolt holes that had previously housed a bunch of piss-head crack addicts.

More annoying than the rain was the slug in his arm. Frank hadn’t bled out yet, so he probably wasn’t going to, but that wasn’t the point. He’d got shot at all — _that_ was the point. He was getting too fucking old for this shit. Too slow. He’d been doing it for going on forty years, which was thirty-nine years longer than he’d expected to. But did that mean he was done? Was it time to just hang up his hat and retire?

Fuck that shit. As long as he had breath in his lungs, he wasn’t going to stop. They’d have to put a slug in his brain to put him down for good. And with all these low-level thugs all having shit for aim, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. 

You’re not supposed to dig the slug out. That’s classic Hollywood bullshit. The anti-hero gets shot, and he’s so bad-ass that he digs the that perfect, completely-recognisable round out with his knife, all while gritting his teeth and looking ultra-macho. That shit causes more damage than it fixes. That’s how you bleed out. Chances are, that bullet’s stopping most of the blood anyway. All a knife is going to do is cut more of you open, and maybe nick a few arteries along the way. Unless that chunk of twisted, molten hot lead is stopping vital organs from functioning, you leave it where it is. And if it _is_ stopping vital organs from functioning, you’re already dead. You’d need Stephen Strange at the height of his career, a hell of a lot of luck, and your chosen deity on your side. 

Frank could probably set off a metal detector from ten feet away. Funny enough, it had been years since he’d been close enough to one to know for certain. Somehow, he wasn’t too keen to try.

Like hell he was going to dig the slug out of his arm, but he wasn’t just going to let it fester, either. The last thing he needed was gangrene to set in. Just like going to a hardware store and buying lots of rope, plastic sheets, duct tape, and a couple of shovels might raise a few eyebrows, surprisingly so will going into Walgreens and buying a bunch of bandages and peroxide. Not the sort of eyebrows that might get the cops called, but do it enough times, and they’ll start considering it. But a guy walking in at two in the morning and buying their biggest pack of maxi pads? That goes completely unnoticed. They even come in sterile little wrappers, packaged individually for convenience. 

Frank hardly felt the sting of the Listerine he poured over the open wound on his arm (he wasn’t going to waste the vodka on that. Rotgut though it was, it was still more expensive than the Listerine). He’d almost become numb to it over the decades of this job he’d appointed himself. It’s not that it didn’t hurt, because it did. It hurt like hell. But he’d learned to shut that out and just not think about it. For the first few years, whenever he poured that brandy or vodka over himself, his mind always went back to them — back to Maria and the kids. Back to the knowledge that this was what killed them. That someone had done _this_ to his family. He’d been glad that he hadn’t been there to hear them screaming because some cocksucker had put a bunch of hot lead in them.

He hated himself for not being there.

Part of him was glad that he wasn’t. He hated that part of himself, too.

Frank was still human, despite the accusations of some. He had not become a machine. He was not a monster. He was a man doing a very shitty job, and like any other man, he still had urges. They weren’t needs. When he was younger, he might have thought that, but he was old enough to know better now. Needs were why he ate and shit and pissed. Urges are something else entirely.

Something he could just ignore with enough willpower, and Lord knows he’d gathered that in surplus. That’s not saying he did always ignore them, but he could if he wanted to. Sometimes he did.

After he slapped that maxi pad to his arm and taped it down with blue painter’s tape, he took care of the first urge, and this time, he grabbed that bottle of vodka. He didn’t get drunk — hadn’t in years. He needed to be sharp and alert, and couldn’t be dealing with the roomspin and pounding headaches of a hangover. He knew just how much to drink to feel like he was starting to get drunk, but could still hit his target from fifty yards. Not that he often had that sort of distance between him and his target, but it’s a good skill to have.

He drank and listened to the rain, keeping his eyes on the door. In one hand, he held the bottle of vodka. In the other, his Bersa .380. With the hollow points, it would take anybody down, but without the obvious bang of something bigger. Anyone who did hear it over the rain would just mistake it for something falling over from too much water on it. Not that there was anyone ever around to hear it, but Frank was far too old to take dumb chances like that.

He took chances, but not dumb ones.

He drank slowly, waiting for someone to bust down the door. There was always a point where if someone was going to break in, they would have done it already, and that was the point when Frank let himself relax as much as he ever did. He was still tense — would always be tense — but he let his guard down just that little bit. He slowly put down the bottle of vodka and the Bersa, keeping both within easy reach. Like almost everything he did, he moved as if he were on autopilot. He didn’t even think about it. He just unzipped his jeans and barely pulled himself out of his shorts. Nothing about what came next was remotely erotic, or even terribly sexual. It was just jerking off, plain and simple. There were no fantasies about girls with big tits and tiny bikinis. He didn’t even think about Maria. If he thought about anything, his mind wandered aimlessly, about cleaning his guns, or where his next mark would be. And like any other time, he spent his load before he even fully exhausted his train of thought.

He wiped his hand on the side of his jeans and looked over at the Bersa. Sometimes, he thought about turning it on himself. Those thoughts came and went, sometimes frequently, and sometimes with months between. Looking at the nickel-plated handgun, he wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking about cleaning it, because it had been a few days, and the poor thing had seen a lot of use. An improperly-cared-for gun was just as dangerous as any suicidal thoughts. But he had two obstacles in his way.

He didn’t have his kit, and he only had the Bersa on him. In a pinch, he could use the vodka bottle, but that’s a one-hit deal. Two if he could manage to smash it and keep the neck well enough intact to stab someone.

That was a pretty big “if.” Frank had already been shot once. He wasn’t going to take any more dumb chances. Not that day. He zipped his jeans back up and picked up the Bersa again. He’d learned how to sleep without ever really sleeping. It meant he slept a lot, but he had a lot of downtime when he wasn’t getting rid of the monsters the cops wouldn’t. He could sleep with a gun in his hand without dropping it or accidentally firing it. He’d been doing it for years, and he’d do it again. And again, and again, for as long as it took. Because somebody had to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you want it, you can always find my contact info and schedules for current WIPs [on my profile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/profile).


End file.
